Sunday, November 11, 2012

Romney's me-too policy of appeasement: Blame Bush

I used to be in touch with someone who was a volunteer every year at the New York City Marathon. As many of you know, I used to run in the Marathon, and was actually a bit better than average at it. My friend told me that after every race, Fred Lebow, the Marathon director and founder of the New York Road Runner's Club, would bring together the most senior volunteers for a meeting in which they were only allowed to criticize the Marathon's running. Nothing positive. They would then take the critiques and use them to make the Marathon better.

If the Republican party wants to get better, they need to look at what went wrong in this campaign and improve it. I saw some of that in a piece last week that expressed hope that Marco Rubio could put together an immigration policy that wouldn't result in the party being eviscerated by the Hispanic vote, while not opening the floodgates to thousands of jihadis. Caroline Glick has put together a critique of the Republicans' foreign policy which is simply a must read. In the process, she does something the Democrats will love: she blames George Bush. But I must say that I did not find a single word here with which I disagree.

For a host of reasons, Republicans have failed to make the case for
an alternative to Obama's policy of appeasement. During the election
campaign, Mitt Romney embraced Obama's support for the establishment of a
Palestinian state. He refused to say that the U.S. must take military
action to thwart Iran's nuclear aspirations, despite the clear failure
of the current bipartisan policy of sanctions against Tehran. Justifying
Obama's abandonment of the United States' longtime ally Hosni Mubarak,
Romney said that he would have abandoned Mubarak as well, even though
Mubarak was the anchor of the United States' alliance system in the Arab
world. Romney failed to criticize Obama's open-door policy for friends
of the Muslim Brotherhood within the U.S. government.

Romney's
"me too" foreign policy was not simply a consequence of his hope to
make suburban mothers in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio feel
comfortable voting for him. Rather, it was a function of his political
camp's greater failure to recognize and contend with the unpleasant and
hard realities of the world as it is. The conservative camp in general
has been too timid to face the strategic implications of the Islamic
world's embrace of the cause of jihad and its goal, Islamic world
domination.

During the Bush years, the
so-called neoconservative camp believed it had formulated the means of
convincing an American electorate dominated by the leftist media to
support the projection of American power in the Islamic world. Claiming,
and believing, that the purpose of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was
to liberate otherwise tolerant and liberal-minded Muslims from the yoke
of authoritarian governments, neoconservatives promoted an argument
that permitted Republicans to avoid making the hard case for victory.

Even
more destructively, the neoconservative campaign to make the Islamic
world ripe for democracy necessarily ignored the larger pathologies
there that rendered the totalitarian dogma of the Muslim Brotherhood the
most salient and popular ideology among Sunni Muslims. The
neoconservatives' focus on democratization blinded them to the fact that
authoritarian and problematic allies like Mubarak were often the only
possible allies available to the United States. Finally, the
neoconservatives' insistence that the urge toward democracy and freedom
is universal led to their failure in places such as Iraq and Egypt to
use U.S. resources wisely. If everyone is just like us, then there is no
reason to cultivate the habits of liberty. There is no reason to
empower women. There is no reason to financially and politically support
nascent and weak democratic forces or to postpone elections until the
scales are properly tipped in the direction of moderate forces congruent
with U.S. interests. There is no reason to support Christian
minorities. There is no reason to insist on the normalization of
relations between countries such as post-Saddam Iraq and Israel.

Instead,
elections were perceived as a panacea. Give the Arab world the vote and
all will be well. In the event, the result was just the opposite. The
Palestinians elected Hamas -- their branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Egyptians and Tunisians elected the Muslim Brotherhood.

The
Bush administration's false claim that the masses of the Islamic world
share the values of the American people led to other problems as well.
First and foremost, it confused Bush and his advisers about the
distinction between Israel and its neighbors and so brought about Bush's
full-throated support for Palestinian statehood. His endorsement came
even as it was becoming undeniable that the Palestinians, with their
addiction to terrorism, their support for jihad, and their
anti-Americanism and genocidal anti-Semitism, are the embodiment of all
the pathologies of the larger Arab world. If you believe that Israel is
no better than the Palestinians, then it is a short step to concluding
that weakening Israel on the Palestinians' behalf is only fair.

Losing
sight of what makes Israel America's closest strategic ally, the Bush
administration relegated it to the uncertain category of "special
friend," sending to the Arab world the message that the U.S. was a
treacherous ally and fundamentally confused about its interests in the
global arena. If the so-called "peace process" was America's chief
concern in the region, then it followed that the U.S. should empower its
worst enemies at the expense of its closest ally.

And
indeed, by supporting Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and
insisting on an Israeli ceasefire with Hezbollah in the 2006 war in
Lebanon and northern Israel, the U.S. did in fact help its worst
enemies. In Gaza, it supported the establishment of a jihadist state
that has since contributed to the transformation of Sinai into a
jihadist base of operations, and it emboldened the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt and Jordan. And it facilitated Hezbollah's -- that is, Iran's --
takeover of Lebanon.

The Republican party's
failure to reconsider the ill-founded assumptions of Bush's foreign
policy toward the Islamic world led inevitably to Romney's adoption of
it in the election campaign. And as a consequence, his endorsement of
Palestinian statehood and of Obama's abandonment of Mubarak made it
impossible for Romney to draw a meaningful distinction between Obama's
foreign policy and the foreign policy Romney himself would follow if
elected.

There's a lot of food for thought here for Prime Minister Netanyahu too. He too must understand that the 'peace process' and a 'Palestinian state' are not a solution to our ills any more than they are the solution to America's ills. And while 'how I'll resume the peace process' or 'how I trust President Obama to stop Iran' are speeches that will make the Dan Meridor's of the world feel good, they're not much of a policy. Like the US Republicans, Netanyahu too must confront reality. Luckily, he will be doing it sooner than November 2016.

0 Comments:

Links to this post:

About Me

I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 12 to 33 years and eight grandchildren. Three of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com